Sunday, September 28, 2014

You See That Bald Bronco Tearing Tickets at the Carousel?

My friend Zen's post that mentioned merry-go-round in the post's title made me immediately flash to Victoria Williams' song Merry Go Round off Happy Come Home, one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever. Fuck me, it's been at least two years since I thought of Victoria Williams. All I have is cassettes. All I had is cassettes, downloaded Happy Come Home and Loose and Musings of a Creek Dipper last night, spent the night with them, love again, will fill out the discography next paycheck cycle. Holyfuck, brought out of MSADI5G's attic and back into inner circles. And bless Serendipity as always - the day after buying a ticket to see Lambchop in December I remember Victoria Williams' music cause Lambchop wouldn't sound like Lambchop had Victoria Williams not sounded like Victoria Williams first. That's a compliment all around, yo.

I did find a couple of McGarrigle Sisters CDs, so you know what's coming in the coming days.

Zizek on disposable life: For Zizek, the issue of ‘disposable lives’ in the contemporary
period does not simply relate to some small or invisible minority.
According to the new logics of global capitalism, the vast majority of
the worlds citizens (including almost entire Nations) are deemed to be
worthless and superfluous to its productive needs. Not only does this
point to new forms of apartheid as the global cartography for power
seeks to police hierarchies of disposability, it further points to a
nihilistic future wherein the aspirations of many are already being
sacrificed.

Yes, I've long dropped the long-running greatest academic fraud of his generation gag re: Zizek. Not only has his celebrity and influence waned, it is unfair to all the other great academic frauds of this generation.

Everyone is a fraud. I realize I grossly self-exaggerate my fraudulence, but I like to think I'm as good a fraud as any.

Violence is mine: In a number of contemporary artists whose works deal with the digital —
the so-called post-internet artists — a marked, almost frightening
feature is their tendency towards violence. The figure, which had been
largely absent from contemporary art for the past few decades, has
returned, but only to be pulled apart, dissected or made to disappear —
not with any visible bloodshed or abjection, but clinically, echoing in
style the unreality associated with the digital. This return to the body
as a subject of hostility suggests that the proximity on the internet
to representations of extreme violence is a kind of imbrication — an
unresolved culpability from those watching toward what’s seen.